Calendar Hanging
by Acey Dearest
Summary: Even winds to seas are reconciled at length. Raphael, Sara, and six months of recuperation spent in Assiah. Postseries, spoilers. Raphael/Sara.


"Calendar Hanging"  
by Acey Dearest

Author's Notes: Spoilers. Postseries with liberties, inevitable mentions of Setsuna/Sara incest, very lightly implied sex, and mature content. Raphael/Sara.

_miss april_

Life moves at such a frenetic pace here that Raphael can't get used to it. Life changes here in a way he isn't accustomed to. The seasons alter too much, too quickly. The air is polluted, the prostitutes walk the streets at night. The sounds of cars and bikes and people, always _people_, ring in his ears. Tokyo in 2000 corresponds to all the stereotypes he holds dear of Assiah, and of humans. It's a pit, but a bewildering one.

Heaven had a rhythm to it that Raphael could match, soft and agonizingly slow. Lilting and lyrical, where great angels could waste centuries neck-deep in routine and duty. The filth was never displayed in the windowpanes, or advertised on television. He's as appalled by Assiah as he is fascinated, and he can't keep up.

He tries, though, especially at first. The night after he arrives, Raphael buys a calendar from a street vendor, and hangs it from a tack on his wall. It's a pin-up affair in a mock vintage style. Miss April smirks down at him wearing a too-short maid outfit and holding a duster. Raphael thinks of the Sisters and is almost revolted every time he reaches up to mark an x on the day.

It doesn't matter, though, not really. He has everything he needs for his stay: an overflowing bank account, a falsified passport, a car, and an apartment loaded with antique vases and furniture. When spending money isn't enough, Raphael takes graduate classes at the university to pass the time, physics and chemistry. The professors know absolutely nothing. He spends most of the lectures drawing caricatures in his notebooks, scribbling reminders in the margins. Meaningless notes, like _tell Michael I saw a tank today_, omitting how it was only in a power-point presentation. In-between classes, he goes to the campus library, dragging out stepping stools from under the tables when the books are out of reach.

He doesn't complain.

A week into his coursework and he finds Sara again, in that not-quite-by-accident fashion he has, carefully tracking down her aura through the miles of subways and buses, bicyclists and pedestrians, searching for the faintest scent of rain. It takes him that long, he believes, because his powers still haven't—and won't—recover fully for another six months at the soonest. He's not willing to entertain any other explanation.

When he finds her, she's working at a café. Her long brown hair is pulled back into a high ponytail. She doesn't notice him walking in, and he hides his face in a newspaper left on the table.

"Good morning, Sara-chan," he offers.

For a second she freezes, looks hurt and caught, obscenely, wrongfully _caught_ all at once. He doesn't know why, and something in his expression must give away his confusion because she apologizes immediately afterward, runs up to him. Small arms wrap around his waist, tugging him in tight to her.

"Raphie-kun! I've missed you!"

_miss may_

He learns to fly again. It's a slow process, wing regeneration, only possible because of who he is. They hadn't been severed completely. By mid-April he can't sleep on his back anymore, he can feel the phantom bones and membranes pushing out around his shoulders, straining his muscles. White translucent wisps in the mirror, that's all at first, and each touch is a pinprick of pain. The feathers grow back in utter disorder, and he wakes up after more strenuous nights to find the down on his bed.

He starts to clean it up before remembering again that the girl sleeping soundly beside him can't see it anyway.

For a few days his wings look skeletal, crippled, but retracting them hurts too much to be an option for more than minutes at a time. He takes medication, doses himself on human and angelic painkillers. Within four days he's gathered and manufactured enough drugs to nearly construct a pharmacy in his apartment. But that's as normal as anything else. Barbiel always warned him not to self-medicate, claimed with a small smile that over the years he had the slightest tendency to overdo it. Back during the war, is what she means, really, when his face had been so badly burned he couldn't heal it himself, and his hands were charred, blackened, still clutching the remnants of a cigarette stub because he couldn't move his fingers enough to drop it. He'd prescribed himself a near-hourly pill regimen almost as soon as he was conscious, kept at it privately for a solid month until a Sister discovered the pill organizer while cleaning his desk.

A doctor is always his own worst patient.

The drugs dull his vision worse than his brain, making him squint in Rococo-style mirrors to put on his contacts. Making him nap, mostly, numbing his body to such an absurd extent that he's barely sure he's still alive— but the funny thing is that time does move slower, then, slow enough for him to manage.

It's only then that he starts backing down on his dosages, weaning himself off the drugs with habitual slowness. He writes out his own medical excuses for his classes and faxes immaculate copies of his pre-lab reports to his professors. He avoids the coffee shop. When he's well enough to return, Sara is there, hands on her hips, pen holding her hair up in a messy bun.

"Where were you?"

"At home."

"I thought you'd gone back without telling me!"

"That wouldn't be gentlemanly, would it?"

"I was worried, okay? Geez." A pause. "You're not looking so good, Raphie-kun. Are you all right?"

She studies him, suddenly frowning.

"They're out, aren't they? I can tell." She lowers her voice to a confidential whisper. "Your wings. Why?"

"Because I felt like knocking into every object in my path in the hopes that a pretty girl like you would notice."

"I can't see them like I did before." Sara shrugs. "In Heaven. But I know they're there—it's funny, I can feel it. When I was small, I used to see them on Setsuna."

Raphael doesn't say anything for a long moment, finally glancing away before forcing himself to retract the wings in order to sit at the booth. Sara gnaws her lip, taking the pen out of her hair, making it fall past her shoulders. Past her waist. _Cascade_. The sentimentality of the thought makes Raphael roll his eyes, but Sara doesn't seem to notice. She's only let it down to put it right back up again with the red elastic on her wrist.

"A-anyway, what would you like to order? The coffee, or—"

"The coffee and a piece of sheetcake," he says.

"Raphie-kun's getting daring. White, yellow, or chocolate?"

Too many choices, that's the problem with Assiah. Too many choices, and all of them meaningless. He almost says so.

"White. If I have to pick a frosting flavor, go with vanilla."

"But you don't have to pick," Sara says.

_miss june_

He decides Sara sees him as worse than a brother— a natural brother— before long. To her Raphael must occupy some awkward space in-between an only half-tamed pet and a perverted, permanently bachelor friend, as apt to bite as to make an unsuccessful pass. He's not sure which part irritates him worse. Probably the pet analogy. It wrenches his control away, and that's not right at all.

Because Raphael's in control. He's too selfish not to be. He's here because he _has_ to be here, because heaven's current situation isn't good for a recovering elemental angel. Raphael has more enemies than anyone else Sevi left alive; the crumbled power structure only means that to many, he's taken the dive from merely expendable to absolutely useless. A relic. Hand over his powers and title to Barbiel, that's what they'd demand of him, if they knew where he was. She would do more good in two days than he had in two centuries.

He told Barbiel that when he woke up, when she told him what he'd missed.

She had protested, but logic was on his side, logic and the wounds a year in the chamber hadn't healed, and she had let him leave.

He's listening to Sara again, on another of her thirty-minute breaks. He wants to enjoy it as much as he can, but he reminds himself that she thinks it's a sacrifice, her twice-weekly duty to her lonesome pet-bachelor. That's right, she thinks she's doing him a service, in that annoying self-centered, self-congratulatory way she has. Raphael isn't Setsuna, as cold a comfort as that is. He's not Lucifer, either, for that matter, making a noble warrior-goddess out of a woman as entrapped in her role as the prince of lies himself. Raphael would never put Sara on such an impossible pedestal. At least he sees the faults in the girl he wants most of all.

He cuts her a piece of his sheetcake on a whim— yellow today, with chocolate icing— but she won't take it. Instead, Sara dawdles with the napkins, pulling them out of the holder.

"You're not happy. I want you to be happy, Raphie-kun."

"I'm fine."

"No. You're—you're the same as when I first met you. I thought you'd be different, somehow."

"Why would I be different? It's only been a year, Sara."

"You should be different," Sara says, insists, almost. "Is it because you're... you're still hurt? Is that it?"

"No."

"Yes it is. Then it's my fault." Sara's lips are pursed as she gazes at the napkins. Raphael wishes for a cigarette. "I... Raphie, is there anything I can do?"

"I'm all right. My wings have healed enough I could take you flying."

He knows the answer before her lips move, apologetic and patently frustrating. _That wouldn't be a good idea. No, thank you, Raphie-kun._ So he cuts her off immediately with all the expertise he can muster, the best smile he can offer, and sets down his fork.

"In fact, that's what you can do for me. Let me take you flying." Raphael couches the rest of the words in absent practicality, folding his napkin on top of the plate. "I need the practice. I haven't flown in nearly a year. What do you say, Sara-chan?"

He still half-expects her to shake her head.

"Where would we go? Raphie-kun, Tokyo's much too big a city to—"

"I'll take care of everything. I'll pick you up. What would be a good day for you?"

For a minute he thinks he's too insistent, that it's too obvious what this really means to him and she'll back away just the way she did before. Balk at his attentions, cringe as if he's about to hurt her. Her face softens, though, and she nods faintly, not quite looking at him.

"Tuesday after work. I - I get off early, at two, so if you'll come around two-fifteen, then that'll give me a little time to freshen up, and..."

"Tuesday it is. I'll be seeing you, Sara."

Her break is almost over anyway. He grabs his briefcase from the floor, slips a hand into his pocket and pays for the food. By now she doesn't ask if he wants change and doesn't argue over the ungainly tip, just lets him walk out the glass door. To his relief.

xxx

He has to drive her to the countryside, waiting in what feels like miles of traffic before the road and the cars ease off. Apartments give way to wilderness after what seems like hours. Time goes slowly in the worst possible way, the stick shift slick with sweat. She fidgets in her seat, tapping her fingers on the windowpane. He lets her pick the radio station, ten minutes before he parks the car and ushers her out, beckoning her toward the dry, yellowing grass.

"Flipflops, Sara-chan?" and he shakes his head. "Take them off. We don't want anyone dying from a shoe falling on their head."

"Maybe I'd say it was your fault," Sara says, smiling a little, bending to take the shoes off and set them in the floorboard of his car before she joins him back on the grass.

He picks her up easily. She's lighter than before.

"What if someone sees?"

"They won't. They're blind to this sort of thing. The only thing you have to worry about is us crashing into a plane."

"_Raphie-kun_! Are you serious? Don't joke like that!"

He unfurls his wings before she can say anything else, or fidget out of his arms. She stiffens up, and he wishes she wouldn't, but starts to fly all the same. There's a good wind today, only because he's nudged it along. There's a cooler full of soda and sandwiches in the backseat of his car. There's a blanket he bought yesterday in the trunk, to spread out on the grass afterward. There's everything below him, but for all her grip on his shirt, there might as well be nothing with him.

_miss july_

"What do you want, Raphael?"

It's a question he's heard a hundred times before. Today he's hearing it from a fellow grad student. Gray eyes, blonde hair. Refreshingly taller than average. An American ex-pat, studying ways to get her family into staggering amounts of debt. Or so she told him a week before.

She's not in his class, which is both unfortunate and lucky. He's catered to the stereotype: his passport says American, a lie he can't afford to cling to in the midst of the genuine article. He has to offer up another backstory, fake another accent, cloying to his tongue. It's been a hundred years since he's stayed for any length of time on Assiah, and he worries that his pronunciations are archaic— but investing in a T.V. set with a tape player attachment, and a pile of foreign movies helps. His classmate never questions his wording when he switches over to English for her visits, anyway, which makes him feel like he passes well enough. The language of angels never was so coarse.

He's romancing her. It's only ardent on her end. In another month she'll try not to so much as look in his direction as they shuffle out the university doors, but now she's lying in his bed, leaning her head against the pillows, and asking that question.

"What do you mean?"

He can't conjure her name outright. He thinks it's Biblical. It might be Elizabeth, it might be Mary.

"Out of this. Not even out of this. Out of life." She crooks a smile. "Too nice an apartment for a regular grad student, you know? Whose money are you blowing?"

"My poor dead aunt's. Sixty-seven and she died of a brain tumor."

"That's so sad. But you can't lounge around in Tokyo forever. How old are you? I'd guess twenty-five, but—"

"I'm as old as eternity. And eternity's how long I'd like to spend with you, if given the chance."

"You say the sweetest things." She smiles, reaches over to play with a few strands of his wavy blond hair. "I've never met a man like you. Most men can't flirt, but you? You're perfect."

_miss august_

He can't see Jibril in her. Jibril never looked at him like that, even when they were children, not with that mix of tenderness and an odd kind of pity. Jibril's small barbs never hurt the way Sara's smiles do.

He thinks sometimes it's because Jibril didn't sympathize, considered herself above it. Firm and righteous, out to upbraid the sinner, certain that she would have never succumbed the way he had. _Succumbed_—that was the way she'd put it that day centuries ago, when she'd finally deigned to speak to him again, three years after Belial, when Jibril decided he'd had enough of silence and needed her lectures instead. On lust, and fornication, and all he can do is laugh nauseously when he sees Sara and knows what sexual taboos the girl's broken. Continuing to break. Jibril would go on a crying jag for the Grigori, for all the good _that_ exercise ever did, faster than she'd offer up so much as a sad look on his behalf.

But it's another sixty or seventy years before he'll be forced into dealing with her again. See that cold propriety in petticoats and brocade and stays, hear the cheers all around heaven once their beloved cherub returns. In the meantime, he has the visits.

Raphael goes into that cafe with all his old promises and assurances. Tells himself it means nothing to her, it should mean nothing to him. A diversion between classes and pills, neither of which has tapered off yet.

The lie's over by the time Sara gets to his table, carrying her lunchbox. Dark circles under her eyes. She doesn't bring her lunch most of the time, settling for the cafe's little sandwiches and cakes to keep her going. She only makes lunch herself when she's up early, she's told him.

He doesn't mention it, though, not yet. She spreads out the lunch on top of a pink paper napkin before sitting down across from him. Not much: a croissant, spread oddly with peanut butter and jelly and folded sideways. A thermos, probably full of soda from the fountain, though Raphael hesitates to actually guess. A package of crackers, and an apple.

"Long day?" he says by way of greeting. She nods.

"I wish—it…" She laughs. "No. Here I go again, annoying you by complaining! You must think I'm silly."

"Not at all. Sara, give me your hand."

She hesitates before offering it. Her hand is small, the fingers short, almost stubby— or maybe it's only the comparison to his own that make them that way. Half Sara's nails are gnawed almost to the quick, but that's not what he comments on.

"Your pulse isn't as it should be." For an insane moment he wants to run the tips of his fingers lightly across the back of her hand. "You're exhausted. You haven't gotten much sleep the last few nights, have you?"

"It's nothing."

"It's something. I worry about you."

"You're kind to me, Raphie-kun. But I'll be all right."

"I'm never kind," he says, dropping her hand. His fingers tap on the table. "I'm a doctor with the heart of a banker, my dear. I never do anything without expecting a bigger return. Remember?"

Sara flinches.

"Why do you always say horrible things like that about yourself? They aren't true. You're not really like that."

"Except I am." Raphael leans in, just enough to take the apple from Sara's lunch. He peels off the sticker, imagines pesticides and selective breeding, machines designed to tell when the fruit was ripe and ready to pluck. He imagines, before he brings the apple to her mouth, hiding the wan color of her lips with the too-bright red of the fruit. "Now eat."

"_Raphael!_" Scandalized into distraction at last. She flushes, but doesn't back up her chair. "I can't eat it out of your hand!"

"Can't or shouldn't?"

"Both!" Sara blurts, looking abashed the second afterwards. "I-I mean— you are so improper! You— you're such a—"

"Eat." But he takes the apple away, snatches the knife from his own napkin, and cuts it up into eighths before offering it again, pushing it towards her on his plate. "Please. I know you haven't."

_miss september_

Raphael daydreams about telling her sometimes. About pulling her close someday, alone somewhere, and admitting everything, baring it all like a child. No pretty words now. He's spent them all long before. Just desperation, that's all that's talking now, as he says to her, _you're not meant for this life, Sara, you're not happy with it._

_I see it— I'm not imagining it, that far-off look, you ache, don't you? It's not how you pictured it, it's just cafes and tips and getting by, and you're not meant for it, any more than I was meant for a heaven where God's will didn't reign supreme, where sin was no longer sin, or an earth where everything was too real for me to stand. You're not well here. Neither of us are. So let's go, Sara, let's find a place, carve out a niche all our own where none of it matters and none of it hurts—_

Even in the dreams she doesn't go with him. Just stares, brown eyes piercing straight through him, feverishly bright, and her body stiff and proper as a statue, a monument.

"Raphael, you don't know," she says, voice strained, but she lets him coil her hair around his fingers, wrap his arms around her waist. She lets him, and he wakes feeling worse than if she'd shoved him away.

xxx

It's all a matter of perception.

Sara can't save him any more than anyone else. He thinks he knows that, now, thinks he consciously understands but the desire continues to grapple with him, making him clench at _nothing_—less than nothing, living for thirty minutes with a coffeeshop waitress, dying every night with another in an eternal line of girls like so many storefront mannequins. Strip the clothes and each body might as well be the same as the next. They all look alike when he tells them it's forever.

The satisfaction is fleeting. Back in Heaven they knew better than to believe him; his lavish vows aside, they knew a tryst with the archangel of wind would never amount to anything real. The closest he's ever come is Barbiel. The human girls, though, they want to believe him, this blond foreigner with an apartment furnished with the best Tokyo can offer, with an appetite for the grand but a disdain for the divine. They want him to step out of the storybook. Play his part for more than a few hours at a time. They don't know he's played it for centuries.

_miss october_

Sara confides in him. Only sometimes, in vague snatches and far-off looks, before remembering her job and dashing away, trays in hand. She looks tired today. She looks tired every day.

He never asks how Setsuna is. She usually supplies the information herself, and Raphael isn't sure if it's accidental at first, or if she just wants to remind him, as if the knowledge isn't already bored into his skull. Raphael won't look her in the eye when she talks about him, always glancing at the newspaper, smearing the ink with his fingertips. He imagines the way her face must light up well enough on his own, as though she was privy to a great secret she'd never consider sharing. All the exhausted comparisons spring to his mind unbidden: Orpheus and his Eurydice, a love that made the stones cry. Tristan and Isolde. Her love—_their_ love is so elevated, so divine it makes him sick.

Setsuna's working as a cook in a fast-food place, a subway ride away. Raphael's known that much for months, now, but not how Setsuna hates the work, or how he burns his hands constantly on the hot grease— that's new, that's something Sara's finally deigned to share. It's awful, she says. His hands are calloused. Raphael tries to restrain himself from smirking when she reveals details like that, hiding his face in the menu.

"What would he rather do?"

"Oh… have adventures, it looks like." Sara rolls her eyes. "It's—it's nothing."

"Sara, if he's not making enough money to support you, I would be glad to—"

"No." Sara's posture stiffens and her tone gets colder. "No, thank you. We get by fine. It's not that. He just isn't happy as much anymore."

Raphael cuts into the sheetcake.

"We… I think he liked it more than I did."

He doesn't want to press. Setsuna is the quickest way to sour his mood, but there's an odd, lost look in her eye now, sadder than usual.

"I didn't like it. I was glad to meet you, and Mika and Lil, but Heaven was awful. I - I meant to ask you before how things were going there. Now that Sevi's gone."

"I don't know."

Sara blinks at him.

"You don't know? But—it's where you're from. You've lived there all your life. You can't tell me you don't know."

"I left almost as soon as I woke up."

"Why?"

He shakes his head, taking another bite of the sheetcake. The icing feels thick, heavy. "In a state like this, it wasn't practical for me to stay."

Sara looks away.

"I'm sorry, Raphie."

"You don't have anything to apologize for."

"I do! It's my fault! If it hadn't been for me—"

"That creature wasn't you." He sets the fork down, stomach churning. Of course. That's why she spends her breaks with him. It's not her brand of self-righteous pity after all; it's just guilt, guilt over nearly killing a man who wanted her so badly, so desperately that he'd gone against heaven, and not in the way Setsuna had, either, bold and brassy without an inkling of foreknowledge, Raphael, Raphael had known what he was doing that day when the gun was put to his head, when he flung open the doors of the courtroom, he had _known_ and _still_ it wasn't enough—

There's no kindness in it. It's restitution, or what her conscience will allow for it, meted out in one faltering excuse for a date in the countryside. One hand clasped in his. Six months of thirty-minute breaks. A cynic like him should have realized it sooner. Sara pays in time for what she owes in his blood.

"So stop it." He can tell she'll say the words anyway, blurt it all, forthright and hurtful as ever.

"You'd be well! Y-you wouldn't have to stay here and—"

"And what? Torment you? Make you think about what happened every time you saw me? Oh, that must be hell for you. I bet you thought I did it on purpose at first. Like I blamed you for it, like I'd dragged myself to this cesspool like a poor lame _animal_, hoping you'd—"

"No! Don't say that! It's not like that! You know it's not like that!"

"I don't know why I didn't see it before. I guess I wanted to delude myself. Pretend that you could care enough to stand me on my own merits. I didn't want to think that it was—"

"It _wasn't_! You've got it all wrong!" Sara's face is crumpling, brown eyes glazed, and Raphael finally realizes that people are staring. "Raphie! Listen to me!"

His hand fists in his coat pocket, brings out the old customary 500-yen piece for his cake and coffee. And then the tip, the too-large tip, four thousand yen for half an hour of her time. He drops it all on his empty plate, and leaves.

xxx

Four hours later he hears his phone ring for the first time in months.

Instead of answering, Raphael walks out the door and into the October night, flies heedless where the sky's cataracts blur the stars.

He's free now. Raphael's cut the last fragile cord tethering him to anyone. He can live for himself again, be the old perverse gentleman again, hiding his empty lust within three-piece suits and rings studded with diamonds. Blind Assiah and heaven and hell with his all-encompassing selfishness, tear them all to pieces with the force of centuries of spite and hurt. He can do all those things, but first he has to land. Unlock the door into his apartment like any human, hear the steady beeping of his answering machine, like a plea.

Press the button and play her message.

"Raphie—"

He hates how he's already grabbing a pen and paper to scrawl down her number.

"Raphie, I don't know if you'll listen to this but I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I... I want you to know I never thought any of that. If you still don't want to see me, you don't have to. I won't make you. But Raphie-kun, I...

"Call me." The syllables have a mechanical unsteadiness as Sara spills out the string of numbers. "At least call me. Even if... if you hate me now, there's something—I want to talk about."

He folds up the number and pockets it. Steps out the doors he just entered, tossing on an overcoat, rationalizing: Setsuna works nights. Sara's told him that before. Setsuna won't be there. She wouldn't have called while he was there. Raphael holds tight to that thought, clutches it as he backs out of the condo's parking lot. He doesn't know her address. He doesn't have to. It's been the six months he'd prescribed himself, after all.

In twenty minutes he's knocking on the door to her apartment.

xxx

Sara greets him after the second knock. She's wearing a gray T-shirt and a pair of striped pajama bottoms; her hair is down, to his relief, the rumpled, natural curls framing her face. She'd look like a high school girl at a friend's sleepover, almost, if it weren't for how the shirt hangs so loosely on her frame, how the purplish circles seem set beneath her eyes. It's worse right now than when he sees her at the cafe—now she looks wan, frail. The cheap florescent lights of her apartment are unforgiving. She doesn't look surprised to see him, and that bare fact makes him hesitate for the first time in years.

"Sara, if I've come at a bad—"

"No, come in. Please," she adds, after a moment. "I'm glad you're here. Have a seat."

Six months here have made him a slave to custom, and he walks in, taking his shoes off and setting them by the door. Her couch is small, cheap, and it sinks a little as he sits in it. She settles down beside him. He doesn't see the need for the standard polite tittering, and swallows before he plunges in.

"I made a fool of myself earlier. It was uncalled for. Did—"

"No. You weren't that loud. My manager didn't even know that anything had happened. So it's okay. Besides, I... I haven't been fair to you." She gnaws on her lip. "You see, it used to make me sad, to think that you'd stayed the same. I'd... I'd wonder about Barbiel and all your women and I—I just knew you still hated them. And everybody else, too. I could tell, because you still had that look on your face, like nothing meant anything to you, and all you wanted was to be somebody else but you couldn't. It took me a long time before I realized I wanted you to be different— I wanted you to be happy— for the wrong reasons."

"There's no wrong reason to want that. But people choose to be happy the same way they choose to be miserable." It's a tired line. They all are.

"I don't believe that anymore, Raphie. I don't think you do, either."

"You've been around me too long. My brand of cynicism shouldn't have won you over in six months flat, Sara-chan." There's an edge to his voice, wire-thin. "You need to be around people your age. Even your brother—"

"Don't talk about my brother. This isn't about him." Sara bites her lip. Raphael glances at her, expecting that familiar flash to her eyes, that righteous indignation, that idea—_what we have, you can't hope to touch_—but it doesn't happen. "He's a good man."

"Even your brother would be a more cheerful companion than me."

Sara laughs then, an odd, worn sound, putting her hand to her mouth and shaking her head. "You only said that to distract me, didn't you?"

"Quite possibly."

"I wish you wouldn't. And you're wrong, too. You can want a good thing for the wrong reason." Sara rubs hard at the knuckles of her left hand, brow creased. "I wanted you to be happy because it meant I didn't have an excuse to be sad myself."

"What are you talking about?"

"Because I hurt you so much worse than... than... didn't I? I'm right, aren't I? I killed Barbiel and hurt you so bad they put you in a coma. They said it'd be ten years and I... if anyone had a right to be upset, you did. But I didn't want you to be upset. I wanted you to be telling me how everything was going, with you and Barbiel a-and Lil and Michael, and I wanted to see you smile at someone that... that wasn't just me and I wanted you to be _better_, Raphie, but it was all for my sake."

"Sara, I don't blame you for what happened. I never did."

"That's not what I mean! You don't understand!" She shakes her head wildly, voice getting louder and louder, about to break. "If you could have come out of that okay, then what right did I have to— I got what I wanted!"

"Sara—"

"I got to come back and be with Setsuna. I got everything. Didn't I? That's what I thought at first, that first day. Everything was going to be all right. I-I saw Tokyo was back the way it was and Setsuna was there, holding me, but... it wasn't okay anymore. None of it was."

"What happened? What are you saying?" He reaches over on instinct, hand on her frail forearm. Sara winces but doesn't pull away, as though every word hurts somehow to hear.

"Don't you _know_? I lied to you, Raphael." Her eyes are watering up. "I can't take it. I pretended until I thought I was going to break. I tried t-to put up a brave face, I did my best. I don't— I don't know if I can stand it now.

"Setsuna works nights. That's the truth. But I didn't tell you he worked nights so we would hardly have to see each other. Would you have believed that?" Sara brushes away tears with the back of her hand, sucking in a breath. "He did it for me, because I asked— no, I begged him to. For me. Just like everything else he's ever done, all his life. He liked the adventure, Raphie. He did. But he loved me so much more and he wanted—he's wanted—I can't, Raphie-kun! I told him over and over I couldn't, I couldn't anymore. I loved him but I couldn't. Not after what happened. Not after Sandalphon—h-he took his form, Raphie, that's how it h-happened, he took his form and held me a-and I didn't _know_.

"How could I after that? How could I make love to him when all I'd see was that thing? We've tried. We still try every few months and we never manage. I-I've started screaming. Screaming at my own brother not to touch me anymore when he loves me, God, Raphie, he loves me enough that he—he stays despite that, so how can I leave?"

He doesn't know what to say. He's staring at her, face frozen in something like horror and shame and guilt, her name on his silent lips. He's thinking of the frailness, the tiredness. Thinking of Sara putting on her smiles like an actress' makeup, like another part of her uniform. Thinking of her trying, always _trying_, through Setsuna's tiny gestures and chaste kisses, clenching her eyes shut, imagining that this time will be better, this time will last.

For a second it's as if time slows down. Blurs so the little apartment isn't so glaringly bright, goes in and out of focus, hazy at the edges. Only Sara's face, that tear-stained, ruined face of a sixteen-year-old girl, is agonizingly clear to him now.

His fingers fumble in his pocket, crumpling a useless bill and a pathetic handkerchief. His mouth moves, stumbles. Closes. Because even Sara's starting to fade, but it's not merciful now, as her features bleed and reshape themselves, just for a moment in his head, and he sees _her_ as clear as ever, all curly red hair and garters, sin on her breath. For that instant he feels long red nails grazing his cheeks, remembers a name blotted out of heaven's record and a name stained forever.

The image is gone as soon as it appears. Only the words echo now, forced up to the surface, unwilling to disappear, the words he'd pictured Belial saying for a thousand years now, imagined her thinking as she kissed his shivering body, his damp hair— _it ruined you, it ruined the great archangel forever—the day I fucked you was the day all that was noble in you died_.

He waits until he can't hear the sounds anymore, pleads with time and Assiah both to go slower now, so that Sara will understand. She must, she has to, and his hand reaches for hers, sluggish, as though he's trailing it through water instead of air. The tiny frail fingers grip his and dimly he's aware that she isn't wearing the ring anymore.

"Raphie—please help me."

xxx

Miss October, all smiles and pumpkin pie, offers up her last day for him to draw an x across the day he helps Sara pack. He'd expected Setsuna to protest his help, over the phone, but he didn't. His voice sounds worn and weathered as he agrees—and that dumbfounds Raphael more than anything else.

"Be better like that. I told her I could, but—truth is, I couldn't stand to. I lost her so many times." There's no contempt to Setsuna's words, no backbiting. No references to the time Raphael tried to steal her away, in that year that must feel to him like centuries ago. No insults. "It's better like this," he repeats.

"I'm sorry."

Setsuna clears his throat.

"How're you doing, anyway, Raphael? Sara said you were almost well."

"Fine. I'm going back after this."

"After..." Setsuna pauses. "After what?"

"After I move her in."

"What, really?" Now the Messiah sounds like Raphael remembers, naive, out of his element, endlessly trying to shoot a target blind. "I figured... a guy like you, you'd—"

"Hardly. There's too much pollution here." His fingers wind around the phone cord as if they were wisps of hair. "I need a place where my breath can come a little easier."

"You're _still_ on about that?" Setsuna manages a choked laugh that makes Raphael unsure if he's swallowed the lying excuse or not. "I thought you were just being a bastard when you—"

"Not at all." The formality dredges itself to the surface before he reaches the phone hook. "Take care of yourself."

"Take care of _her_," he thinks he hears in reply, and it's haunting him hours later as the last of Sara's bags is packed up in his car, and he's co-signing for her new apartment a bus ride away. He's still thinking about it when she's moving in, smile wavering when she thinks he doesn't see, as she hangs up her clothes, puts away pots and pans. Tells him what he's waited over a year to hear—_you really don't have to go back, Raphie-kun, not yet, not like this_—and his resolve almost falters.

He remembers the old daydream of the world all their own, hidden from man and angels both, and it still tempts him. Or maybe it's the look in her eye as she wraps him into a last hug, maybe he's seeing only what he wants to see now in the final minutes before he takes his last look at the streets of Tokyo.

Maybe Setsuna's not so blind after all.

_miss november_

He keeps the calendar. Heaven's atmosphere keeps it from growing crisp and yellowed with age; endless paperwork at his desk keeps it safe at the bottom of the stack of papers. A glance at the date stamped at the top is all the reminder he allows himself of how long it's been, and as the days bleed together he settles into routine, a new one now: negotiations with Hell itself. Rebuilding, restructuring. A world where God's will doesn't reign still requires law and order, and a few archangels willing to see it through. Jibril would—Jibril _will_ have her hands full.

The years melt. They're building schools now, not just the think tanks, and they're open to everyone. They're working on research into DNA restructuring so an angel can more easily reproduce. Decades pass and there remain a thousand things to do, a million causes to strive for, and he throws himself into them with a zeal he hasn't had in so long, he's almost forgotten it existed. He gets too caught up in it all sometimes and Barbiel smiles at him, indulgently, approvingly.

He orders sheetcake and coffee when he takes his lunch breaks, and it's enough.

finis


End file.
